Between Here and There
by Jessica Anahid Shadoian
Tuesday morning and March, drizzling
in the cold, inimitable drizzle of not-yet-spring in Syracuse.
Erik off to office, twins on the bus, homework in briefcases
and backpacks, respectively. Chase down the cat and get her into
the box, four long scratches down the inside of my arm. Griselda
does not want to have her teeth scaled any more than I do. Drop
her off at the vet. To Stop and Shop. Milk, jello, capers, hamburger,
Doritos for the kids. Cool Ranch, the ones that smell like feet.
Not Nacho Cheese. Nacho Cheese sucks, mom. Accutrim, cotton balls,
vitamin C, frozen yogurt. No coupons. Thirty-eight dollars and
change. Paper. It's better for the environment.
I roll the cart out into the
rain, one wonky wheel dragging against the concrete. Un-blipping
the alarm I load the sacks into the back seat of the van, then
slide the side door shut with an oiled, walloping thump. Walking
around the back I catch my reflection in the window and see that
the drizzle has made my hair horrible. The flesh under my neck
looks slack and I stop for a moment, getting closer to my reflection.
I push three fingers up under my chin at my pulse point, pulling
my neck taut. I turn my face side to side, slowly. When I was
a little girl, my mother used to make this same motion at the
mirror above the bathroom sink. She would see me watching, lift
me up and park my bottom on the porcelain edge, then run her
sparkly mauve lipstick over my lips. "Make a kiss,"
she'd say. The oily taste of Avon and my mother's wonderful,
worried face.
Getting into the van I spot
an envelope face down beside my front wheel, kept dry underneath
the van, and by whatever succession of cars parked here before
me. It is brilliantly white on the dirty pavement, and I wonder
how I missed it on the way in. Turning it over, the address reads
Sarah Redmond at Unitron Limited, Syracuse, the same zip code
as Erik's office. The letter has been opened, but miraculously,
not run over, not stepped on, not wet. Settling behind the wheel
I close the door and examine the postmark. Brazil. Hotel stationary
from a place called the Panorama Business Hotel, clean and heavy-cut
with rough, fibrous edges. The rain bounces in hollow aluminum
patter around me, above me, and I am alone in the sealed damp
coolness inside the van. I slide out the letter, unfold it. Read.
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The Moon in Hiding
by Marione Ingram
The Second World War and the
even more odious war within that war consumed my childhood. Under
attack by both sides, I needed more than one miracle to survive.
But not all of the memories are painful.
At the beginning my family lived
in Hamburg, Germany, an ancient and beautiful port city near
the North Sea. My father, who was not a Jew, was forced into
the army but was active in the underground, especially in Brussels
where he and his best friend, an artist of note, elicited secrets
from NAZI officials who sat for their portraits. Although rare,
his home visits were luminous events during which he imparted
his intense will to resist. But the genocidal war within the
War became an increasingly surreal horror as my mother's father,
her younger brother, her sister, her aunts and uncles and their
children were arrested and killed or interned in concentration
camps. Mother and I raged and wept as security police took away
my grandmother, who handed me her teardrop pearl earrings just
before they put her into a van that we later learned was a traveling
death chamber.
Because he had been a communist until the Hitler-Stalin pact,
Father knew people throughout northern Europe who had opposed
Nazism. One survivor of the Gestapo's systematic efforts to uncover
and exterminate all opponents was a woman named Marie Pimber
who lived on a small farm outside Hamburg. Like other former
comrades she might be called upon to support certain acts of
resistance, but we didn't know whether she would assist Jews.
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The Fire-Calf
by Yolanda A. Reid
Grandfather was ninety years old when he arrived in New York
for the first time. He had never been outside of Panama for six
decades. He remained composed, however, and unimpressed by the
skyscrapers or Coney Island. He liked two things only: the whales
at the aquarium and baseball. He nearly drove me mad with baseball,
for he insisted on seeing all the games, was persistent and fastidious
about the schedule, even when I explained that a game had been
cancelled. The voice of the baseball commentator filled the house,
for Grandfather's hearing was imperfect.
I hated baseball.
When he was not watching baseball, he insisted on doing his
own laundry, or scouring all the pots and pans in the kitchen,
or cooking meals I had not seen since my own childhood.
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